Equipment Professions: Your Gear’s Life Cycle

The three equipment trade skills—Blacksmithing, Clothing, and Woodworking—share a number of processes and features. This section seeks to detail the stages through which your gear progresses, from the creation of a piece of equipment, through any improvements you wish to make, all the way to its eventual deconstruction, which provides you with parts to start the cycle anew.

Item Creation

Part 1: Type and Material

At a Blacksmithing Station, Clothing Station, or Woodworking Station, access the Creation menu. You should notice sub-menus for Type, Material, Style, and Trait. To begin with, focus on the type and material of equipment you’re about to make.

Type: This is the type of creation you end up crafting. You might forge a metal sword or axe at a Blacksmithing Station, or a protective hat or robe at a Clothing Station. Or maybe a Woodworking creation like a bow or shield is more your speed.

You can add to the variety of gear you craft by applying different styles and adding traits. When you’re starting out, it’s a good idea to focus on this menu, picking equipment best suited to how you fight.

Material: This is the inventory of all the materials you’ve processed. If you’ve spent Skill Points in your crafting station’s corresponding skill (Metalworking, Tailoring, or Woodworking), a variety of available, previously acquired materials appears here, ready for combining. If you haven’t spent points in one of these skills, only the most basic material type is available—plus any materials you may have scavenged, bought, or been given by a Hireling.

A range of levels exists for creating items, even when using the same type of material. This is because you can add more of the same material in your Material menu and create a higher-level item, up to the maximum allowed. For example, to forge a High Iron Axe at a Blacksmithing Station, the base level would be 16. However, if you add more High Iron Ore ingots, you can raise the level up to 24. The higher the level, the better the item quality, at the expense of your raw materials.

Building the Basics

Blacksmiths, Clothiers, amd Woodworkers can each forge two groups of gear. Consult the following tables:

These types of gear can be made in one of the 49 racial styles, and can be crafted with one or more of nine traits.

Building Better

The level of the equipment you create is the same as the type of material used, so check the Raw Materials table. For example, to create a Hickory Bow at a Woodworking Station, you need Sanded Hickory, Level 36-44. Spend Skill Points on Passive Abilities to access rarer ores, cloth, and woods that allow you to craft better gear.

The other way to improve your item, which begins at Common quality, is through the use of improvement items: tempers for Blacksmithing, tannins for Clothing, and resins for Woodworking.

Blacksmith Rudimentary Equipment

Clothier Rudimentary Outfits

Woodworking Rudimentary Equipment

Part 2: Styles

Style: One of the crafting menus you can choose from is Style. There are 14 styles to choose from, based on the various races in Tamriel. Your own character’s race is unlocked. The others are unlocked when you find and read “Racial Motif” books found across the lands. Feel free to locate any and all of them, or buy them from other players. You also need the semi-precious stone associated with each race. These are primarily found on or in scenery, and aren’t particularly rare.

Crafting gear with a different racial style from your own simply gives the item a different appearance. There are no other differing effects.

Part 3: Researching and Traits

Need the extra resistance to damage and spells when wading into combat? Research weapons with the Defending trait, and have Turquoise gems handy.

Is your cloth armor a little flimsy? Need to enhance its ability to resist enemy Critical Strikes? Research armor with the Impenetrable trait, and have Diamonds ready to go.

Need to fire a bow more quickly, like a fast-fingered elf? Research a bow with the Weighted trait, and prepare your Citrine gems.

Traits: The last Creation sub-menu you can access when crafting your gear is Trait. Traits are special bonuses you can add to an item when you create it, done at the same time when you’re choosing the style, material, and item itself. Note that you must not only research the trait to unlock it, you need to have the material (a precious gem) on hand as well.

Researching: In order to unlock a trait, you need to research it. Traits are relevant only to the item you’re creating. For example, if you’re researching a trait for a weapon, you don’t learn the traits for armor. You must find an item with the trait you wish to learn, and research it at the relevant crafting station. Then you wait a given amount of hours: six hours for the first trait, and double that for each additional trait for that specific item, up to 32 days for the final (eighth) trait.

Mitigate this length of time by starting research as soon as possible, and choose your profession’s corresponding Passive Ability (Metallurgy, Stitching, or Carpentry) to reduce the time frame considerably. During research, the item with the trait you’re learning from is destroyed, but the trait is learned and Inspiration is awarded, as well as the ability to add the trait to the item you’re creating—provided you have the appropriate gem.

For a more in-depth look at traits, consult the Traits section, found earlier in this chapter.

Item Improvement: Tempers, Tannins, and Resins

To begin with, any item you’ve created is listed as “Common” or “Normal,” and is color-coded white. Access the Improvement menu to improve the quality of your chosen item by using tempers for Blacksmithing, tannins for Clothing, and resins for Woodworking. You must advance your item step by step, meaning you can’t jump from Normal quality straight to Epic. The small chart at the bottom of the in-game menu indicates how improvement is achieved.

Improvement Items

Quality	Color	Item	Temper Used to Achieve	Item	Temper Used to Achieve	Item	Temper Used to Achieve	Chance of Success
Normal	White		—		—		—
Fine	Green		Honing Stone		Hemming		Pitch	20%
Superior	Blue		Dwarven Oil		Embroidery		Turpen	15%
Epic	Purple		Grain Solvent		Elegant Lining		Mastic	10%
Legendary	Gold		Tempering Alloy		Dreugh Wax		Rosin	5%

* Chance can be increased to 100% by adding the appropriate number of Improvement Items. Investing in the appropriate Expertise Passive Ability increases your odds even more.

Improving items isn’t as straightforward as adding a temper/tannin/resin and creating an improved version. A single improvement item gives you an added chance of success. This means there’s a big chance that combining your item with an improvement item will fail, in which case the item and improvement item are both permanently destroyed. The more tempers/tannins/resins you use, the greater the chance of successfully improving your item.

You can get tempers, tannins, and resins in a number of ways:

• Acquired from a Hireling
• Bought from other players
• Randomly awarded when refining raw materials
• Randomly awarded when deconstructing equipment of the corresponding category
• Awarded at the end of crafting writs

Item Deconstruction

Any piece of gear you craft or acquire on your travels can be deconstructed at the corresponding crafting station. Once this occurs, you receive some (but not all) of the materials previously utilized in the item’s construction if you made it, or some new processed materials or other goodies if the item was acquired by other means. In addition, there’s a chance the deconstruction may yield an improvement item, a racial stone based on the style of the item, and a precious stone related to the item’s trait, if the item had a trait listed. If deconstructing an item well above your skill level, you may end up with no materials.

Even though there’s a chance you’ll net no materials or other items whatsoever, deconstruction is a good way to recycle items you’ve created or found. It’s also a great way to find improvement items and other enhancements.